2024 NFL Draft: Why drafting a defensive tackle early would not be an ‘all-in’ move for the Cowboys

Based on the last five drafts, this is the type of first-year performance to expect if the Cowboys drafted a DT early.

Every draft season there’s a call from Cowboys draftniks for Jerry Jones and Co. to draft a defensive tackle early in the draft. And this year, fired up by an early playoff exit and emboldened by Mike Zimmer reportedly wanting big bodies on his defensive line, those calls are getting louder, never mind that the Cowboys invested a first-round pick in the position just last year.

Of course, there’s no denying that the Cowboys could use an upgrade along the defensive line, but is it realistic to expect a rookie to fix what ails the Cowboys’ front four? To find out, we take a look at how hard it is for first- and second-round rookie DTs to hit the ground running in the NFL. We’ll look at the 23 defensive tackles drafted in the first two rounds of the NFL draft over the last five years and figure out what level of performance you can reasonably expect from rookie DTs.

We’ll do that by looking at the number of games started by each player per year, and also look at their Approximate Value (AV) for each season in the league.

The algorithm behind AV weights position specific metrics (i.e. yards or points scored/allowed) with an indicator for durability (total games played and seasons as their team’s primary starter) and quality (Pro Bowl and All-Pro nominations) and then normalizes all this at a team level. AV points are fluid from one year to the next, but a rough scale for 2024 would look something like this:

I’ll use six AV points as the cutoff for a good performance. Similarly, I’ll use nine games started (2021-23) or eight games started (2019-20) as the cutoff for a starter season, with allowances made for starter seasons cut short by injury. With that out of the way here’s a look at the last five DT draft classes.

That’s a lot of numbers to wade through, so let’s summarize that data by aggregating the players into three groups according to when they were picked in the draft:

When you draft a defensive tackle in the first two rounds, you are NOT drafting an immediate starter.

Of the 23 defensive linemen in the tables above, only 10 (44%) started the majority of games for their teams in their rookie season. If you want a first-year starter at DT, you’ll probably have to draft that player in the top 16, and even that’s not a sure thing.

The Cowboys of course know this all too well: 2023 first-round pick Mazi Smith started all of three games, and only played on 28% of all defensive snaps in his rookie season.

At the same time, the Cowboys also have an under-the-radar defensive tackle that defies all the data assembled above: Osa Odighizuwa started 12, 17, and 17 games in his first three years and accumulated six, eight, and eight AV points over that span. In the tables above, only Ed Oliver (24) and Jeffery Timmons (25) have more AV points over their first three years than Odighizuwa (22), and nobody started more games over their first three years.

Which just goes to show that there’s an exception to every rule. But if the Cowboys are serious about drafting an immediate impact player for 2024, they’d be well advised to skip defensive tackles early. If they need a big body, there are big bodies galore to be had in free agency.

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If you’re a BTB old-timer and this post felt vaguely familiar, or if you’re just looking for a bigger data sample, we ran a similar analysis in 2014, only we used PFF grades (free at the time) instead of AV:

2014 NFL Draft: What Level Of Performance Can Be Expected From Rookie Defensive Tackles?

You’ll find that 10 years on, the data and the conclusions paint pretty much the same picture.